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Having an online presence is critical for ensuring current and prospective clients can find your practice. A website allows you full control over the branding and imagery. You can also provide more information about your location, staff, and contact details.
Your website is like an extension of your office. Ensuring your site is built with your clients in mind and geared around accessibility will help new and existing clients feel confident in your care.
1. Define your needs
Before you start doing any website building, it’s helpful to get clear on what you need your site to do for you and your patients. Ask yourself the following questions.
How do I want my patient to feel when they land on my website?
What information do I want to share via my website?
How will potential clients use my website?
The way you personalize your website, like the colors and imagery, along with your mission or goal for your practice, is part of your brand.
For example, you likely want incoming patients to feel that they can trust you with their health when looking at your website. You might want to share details about the services you offer, and what patients can expect when they come in.
2. Choose a website template
The fonts, colors, and imagery used on your site are the first impression potential patients will have of your office.
To narrow down options from Squarespace, there’s a Health & Beauty section within the template store. These templates are designed to showcase different types of wellness websites, and how your content could be organized within them.
In particular, the templates Clove, Myhra, and Meriden are great starting templates for a medical site, as they use calm colors and simple descriptive text.
If you’d rather build a custom template, you can use Squarespace Blueprint AI to quickly generate your own.
3. Create a helpful header
Your site header is one of the first things visible when patients visit your site. Make sure the most important information is clearly accessible from your website header. Link out to important site pages, like your booking page, insurance information page, and FAQ. You can also add links to emails or phone numbers so clients can find you easily.
Most website headers also support a button with a link to any URL. You may want to use this button to link to your patient portal, where visitors can access their information via your HIPAA-compliant messaging system.
4. Build your pages
Add website pages based on what you think your clients will want to know. For example, consider a Contact Us page detailing where your practice is located, the hours, and how to get in contact.
Some other pages you may want to include are:
About page: Covering your background, degrees or certifications, and personal biography
Team page: Introducing your practice’s staff
Services page: Listing what services you provide at your practice
FAQ: Addressing common patient questions about appointment scheduling or cancellations or insurance
For additional ease of contact, you can add an email sign-up form to your site. That way you can collect patient email addresses, to easily notify them of any changes to hours or staff.
You can add pages to a Squarespace site by choosing an existing layout and replacing the example information with your own.
5. Customize visual elements
Adding images to your website helps to break up the design and can be used to connect with patients before they step into your practice. Consider adding photos of you and your team to the site, or of the inside of your practice, to start.
Stock images are another great way to add engaging imagery to your site. All Squarespace websites come connected to Unsplash, a free stock image service, and Getty Images, which allows you to purchase licensing for additional images.
Though imagery is a major aspect of website design, keep in mind not all visitors may be able to see them. Inclusive design is critical when formatting your content. You can set alt text for images, which can be read by screen readers to describe the image.
6. Set up online booking
Not all patients want to schedule over the phone. Add Acuity Scheduling to your website to offer easy booking online by embedding a scheduling tool to your site.
You can customize appointment length and other details, so that both the provider and clients know the exact type of appointment they’re booking. That also helps you differentiate between the services you offer, rather than being locked into premade types of appointments.
Speed up the appointment booking process and save paper by collecting client intake forms during booking. These forms are HIPAA-compliant, and can be customized based on what information you need from new clients.
Make sure to share your cancellation policy ahead of time and enable appointment reminders to limit no-shows.
7. Set up your domain
Your domain is the URL visitors use to navigate to your website. This could be the name of your clinic or could be speciality- or location-based. You can even use your own name.
If you register a new domain with Squarespace, you can also receive a matching custom domain email address from Squarespace free for one year. Using an email address with your own custom domain adds professionalism, and separates your business inbox from others you may have.
Learn more about choosing a domain name
8. Optimize for SEO
You’ll want to ensure anyone looking for a practice like yours can find you, by optimizing your website for search engines.
Brainstorm common search phrases that might lead someone to your website, like “NYC physical therapist.” These will be your keywords to include throughout your website content. By default, all Squarespace websites are optimized for SEO, with features that make it easier for search engines to pick up site information. But every site also gives you the option to add keywords in important areas.
In particular, consider adding keywords in these places.
Site description
SEO title and page titles
Heading text
Captions and titles for images
Alt text for images
Ensure your website can be found locally by setting up a Google Business Listing, which links your location on Google Maps with your website and practice information.
Get more SEO tips for your site
9. Keep your patients informed
For updates to clinic hours or other information you want to send clients, consider using a mailing list tool, like Squarespace Email Campaigns. This allows you to send bulk emails using your site’s branding.
The best way to build a mailing list is to add a newsletter block to your site, which collects email addresses. Those email addresses can be stored in your website account.. That way, when sending emails to clients, you can select one mailing list to notify all subscribers.
Adding a newsletter block to your site’s footer is the best way to automatically add it to each page of your site, so visitors are prompted to subscribe once they reach the end of the page’s content.
To highlight important information or policies, you can also add an announcement bar to your website. The announcement bar displays across the top of your website, and is useful for important news such as new clinic hours. You can also use it to link to pages within your site with additional details on upcoming changes.